A North-East medium has hopes her new book will dispel some of the myths surrounding spiritualism. She talks to Women's Editor Christen Pears.

AMY Dium lay in bed, her husband asleep next to her and her Jack Russell, Tim, curled up on the duvet. As she dozed , she began to feel uneasy. It was almost like the energy in the room was vibrating and reaching out towards her.

Tim whimpered and dived to the bottom of the bed, where he lay cowering - and Amy realised there was someone else in the room. Afraid to look, she kept her eyes firmly closed, but she was aware of a presence standing next to her. She tried to wake her husband but was unable to move, and then suddenly, the presence was gone.

The experience proved to be a turning point and Amy is now a medium, serving spiritualist churches across the North-East. Her autobiography, Never Alone, has just been published. Amy Dium (A Medium) is, of course, a pen name.

"I don't use my real name because I want to show that my experiences can and do happen to anyone," she says, sitting by an open fire in her Tyneside home.

Now 63, Amy was the eldest of four children. She was born in a pit village in County Durham and grew up in the shadow of the Vickers Armstrong works on Newcastle's Scotswood Road. Her father walked out on the family when she was just five years old.

"I suppose most girls in Scotswood were destined to become carbon copies of their mothers or grandmothers but I was always the strange one, the one who read too much. If I was given a piece of paper, I wanted to draw or write on it. All my family thought I was weird," she recalls.

But Amy's 'weirdness' really began to manifest itself when she had her first clairvoyant experience at the age of 13 and was seriously ill with tuberculosis. She watched from her sick bed as the door opened and a luminous pillar of swirling green mist came into the room. A voice said: "Don't be afraid. It's only Granddad. You're going to be all right, pet."

Amy's grandfather had been killed during the Second World War but she wasn't afraid; it seemed natural.

"Although I remember it, it wasn't something that was part of my life for many years. I had TB and I got better. It wasn't until I was 45 that things really started to happen," she explains.

Married to Geoff and with two daughters, she was running a successful riding school, while her husband had an antiques business.

"I thought I was happy. I thought I had everything I wanted but then one night somebody came and stood by my bed. I know I wasn't imagining it because the dog saw it as well. I didn't dare tell my husband in case he thought I was going mad but it happened for four months until one night I felt as if the duvet was lifting. In mind, I just asked him to go - and he went."

Later, she says she realised this was her first conscious communication with the spirit world and regretted not investigating further, but at the time, she didn't understand and was frightened.

She confided in Val, a helper at the riding school who knew someone who held seances. Keen to find out what was happening to her, she attended her first seance. As the lights dimmed and the group held hands around the table, Amy began to see spirits - a monk, a group of people at the entrance to a cave - but neither Val nor the others could see them.

To someone unfamiliar with seances and spiritualism, it seems improbable and far-fetched but Val tells her story in such a down-to-earth manner, it's easy to believe her. She's a bespectacled grandmother who wears her hair in a sensible bob, and she occasionally gives the impression she too was surprised by what happened to her.

"I never thought I'd be sitting here telling people about spirit guides and door keepers," she laughs.

After her experience at the seance, she began to attend a spiritualist church. At first, she was disappointed and didn't find the answers she was looking for but she persevered, eventually discovering that she was a medium.

She was hungry for knowledge and eager to develop her skills, visiting church regularly, watching mediums work and carrying out hours of research. But she didn't accept spiritualism until she weighed up all the evidence.

"People think that spiritualists sit in a darkened room and say, 'Is anybody there?' but it's a religion. Spiritualists believe in the continuous existence of the human soul and that these spirits can still communicate even if they no longer have a spiritual body.

"Spiritualism changed my life. I used to be a very forceful person. Someone described me as a "bulldozer of a woman" but spiritualism softened me, it made me see what is really important."

For Amy, spiritualism is a way of life, not just a means of communicating with spirits, but she has developed her mediumistic talent and works in churches across the North-East, putting people in touch with the spirit world. At first, she saw pictures but later began to experience clairaudience, where spirits communicated with her audibly. She also began to get to know her spirit guide, a Victorian gentlemen called Mr Latimer, who helps and influences her.

"I know it sounds weird but that's the way it works. He talks to me, I get these wonderful thoughts just popping into my head. I know he was born in Hammersmith and one day, I'm going to go down to London to see if I can find him, see if he really existed."

She is acutely aware of how strange this sounds to outsiders. She knows the reputation spiritualism has and how wary people are of what she calls its "bogeyman" image. She hopes her book will help dispel some of the myths and explain that psychic phenomena are natural, not supernatural.

"The Spiritualist Church has caused a lot of its own problems because there are people who try to make it sound more mystical than it is. They don't try to educate people but if people realise how it works, they won't be so afraid."